International studio (80.1925)

mceRHACionAL

coach, or drag as it is properly called, the four-
in-hand type of coach erroneously called in
America the tally-ho. The fortunate members of
coaching clubs, both in the last century and today,
are permitted delightful snobberies in the way of
eliminating from their acquaintance anyone guilty
of referring to private coaches as tally-hos, or who
confuses the old road coaches and mail coaches
with the private and sporting drags. Tally-ho is
a Norman-French word, taillis-au, translated "to
the coppice;" the cry with which the huntsman
urged on the hounds. It belongs to foxhunting
only and the harness of a real tally-ho has a fox
or a fox head upon it. In a delightful book called
a Manual of Coaching we read that "the drag
should retain in all its appointments the sporting
character. Unnecessary ornament of any kind is
in bad taste. Down to 1870 drags were made to
take only three persons on each roof seat; now
they accommodate four persons." An account of
a coaching party from New York to Philadelphia
in 1878 is interesting to the modern motorist. It.
tells how the route, through Newark, Elizabeth,
Railway and Princeton and Trenton, ninety miles,
was covered in eleven hours and twenty minutes;
and the return journey accomplished in exactly
the same time. The coachmen were Col. Delancey

Kane and eight other members of the club. Each
provided his own teams, stationed at different
points along the route. As the coach reached each
of these stages, the coachman whose team was at
that point drove to the next stage; and the
member occupying the box seat with the driver
was also changed at each stage that each gentle-
man might have the opportunity of observing a
fellow-member's driving. Col. Kane and his
brother were enthusiastic coachmen. The colonel
drove his own drag, called the Tally-ho, daily
from New York to Pelham and back, a distance
of fifteen miles each way. It was this naming of
Col. Kane's coach which gave rise to the erroneous
use of the word tally-ho in America.

The great majority of the American sporting
prints issued from the press of Currier and Ives;
and the story of this firm, their methods and the
artists they employed is as naive as the products
of their presses. Currier set up in New York at
No. 1 Wall Street in 1835 with two hand presses
as his complete equipment. Later he took Ives
into partnership and the shop was moved to the
corner of Spruce and Nassau Streets. Their litho-
graphs had all sorts of subjects—religious, senti-
mental, historical; travel prints and prints "for
serious thinkers" such as the Four Seasons of Life;

MARCH I925

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